But even by the standards of these Mancunian mavericks, one book stands out for terminal teraticity: David Britton’s Basted in the Broth of Billions (2008). This septic slab of cerebral psychosis is infamous among the counter-cultural cognoscenti for three things above all others: its extremity, its complexity and its incomprehensibility. No two reviewers have ever agreed what’s going on, what Britton is trying to say and even (in certain passages) what language the book is written in.

Seven years on, that hermeneutic fluidity is incisively interrogated in Basteland: The Making of a Masterpiece. It’s a detailed study of Basted overseen by Dr David M. Mitchell, the Post-Polymath Professor of Pantology at Port Talbot University. Convening a toxic team of psychotropic Savoyonauts, Mitchell first baited them to a frenzy, then unleashed them on their subject. He edited the resultant essays and monographs before penning an incendiary introduction of his own.

The interpretations he oversees are, as you’d expect, as varied as the contributors. In the closely reasoned analysis “Strength through Savoy”, transgressive textualist Will Self describes Basted as:

[A] rhizomatically rancid assault on the most helioseismically hallowed corner-stones of the modernist canon, jump-starting the cataclysmically creaking Colossus of On the R(h)o(a)d(es) with an extremophilically eldritch injection of synapse-stewing swamp-soup scooped from the atrabiliously atrociousest anus of the most mephitic myrmidon of Mephistopheles, whilst tipping its panache-packed Panama slyly – and wryly – to that rawest and wrenchingest of gut-grenades in Burroughs’ underground oeuvre: 1955’s never-surpassed Bulgaria on a Budget. (“Strength through Savoy: Notes towards a Vernichtungsliteratur of the Apocalypse”, pg. 46)

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Elsewhere, veteran Savoyologist Polly Toynbee applies the techniques of the Kabbalah to unearth what she alleges to be a pastiche of Enid Blyton’s Five Go to Billycock Hill (1957) in chapters six, eight and nine of Basted, while committed counter-culturalist David Kerekes of Headpress Journal unfolds an intriguing theory about a core motif of Basted:

For countless readers, one of the edgiest and unsettlingest aspects of the book’s full-throttle aesthetic onslaught has to be the way in which, following each stomach-churningly detailed episode of brain-splattering, bowel-strewing slaughter, Lord Horror is inevitably described or depicted as opening and eating a packet of salt’n’vinegar crisps. He then often blows into the empty bag and bursts it. But why? In this essay I hope to explore this question and come up with some (tentative) conclusions as to the symbolism that is at work. (“Our Bite Macht Frei: The Symbolism of Salt-and-Vinegar Crisps in Britton’s Burroughsian Bildungsroman Basted in the Broth of Billions”, pg. 368)

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Kerekes concludes that the crisp-eating episodes are, inter alia, allegories of the Stations of the Cross. He makes an excellent case, but who knows? Bastedin the Broth of Billions defies both description and definition. Basteland: The Making of a Masterpiece will defy something else: your eyes. It’s the first book published by Savoy in what (to the exoteric observer) will appear to be entirely black type on entirely black paper. I’m not going to say how you can read the text, but I’ll give one hint: what Savoy do to English literature, this book does to the electro-magnetic spectrum…
Previously pre-posted on Papyrocentric Performativity:

• Bulg’ Boy Boogie — Literary Outlaw: The Life and Times of William S. Burroughs, Ted Morgan (1991)